36.English phraseology: Structural types.

Among two-top units A.I. Smirnitsky points out the following structural types:

a) attributive-nominal such as: a month of Sundays, grey matter, a millstone round one’s neck and many others. Units of this type are noun equivalents and can be partly or perfectly idiomatic. In partly idiomatic units (phrasisms) sometimes the first component is idiomatic, e.g. high road, in other cases the second component is idiomatic, e.g. first night. In many cases both components are idiomatic, e.g. red tape, blind alley, bed of nail, shot in the arm and many others.

b) verb-nominal phraseological units, e.g. to read between the lines, to speak BBC, to sweep under the carpet etc. The grammar centre of such units is the verb, the semantic centre in many cases is the nominal component, e.g. to fall in love. In some units the verb is both the grammar and the semantic centre, e.g. not to know the ropes. These units can be perfectly idiomatic as well, e.g. to burn one’s boats, to vote with one’s feet, to take to the cleaners’ etc.

Very close to such units are word-groups of the type to have a glance, to have a smoke. These units are not idiomatic and are treated in grammar as a special syntactical combination, a kind of aspect.

c) phraseological repetitions, such as: now or never, part and parcel, country and western etc. Such units can be built on antonyms, e.g. ups and downs, back and forth; often they are formed by means of alliteration, e.g cakes and ale, as busy as a bee. Components in repetitions are joined by means of conjunctions. These units are equivalents of adverbs or adjectives and have no grammar centre. They can also be partly or perfectly idiomatic, e.g. cool as a cucumber (partly), bread and butter (perfectly).

37.English phraseology: Functional types

Kunin has worked out a structural-semantic classification, which reveals the function of

a phraseological unit depending on its size (collocations or sentences).

It was managed to analyse 7 dictionaries (see bibliography) and it is found the following

quantity of phraseological units with the elements referring to ‘life’ or ‘death’ in English and

Russian:

Russian PUs with the element ‘death’ – 21;

Russian PUs with the element ‘life’ – 55;

English PUs with the element ‘death’ – 189;

English PUs with the element ‘life’ – 291.

The author has tried to divide them according to Kunin’s classification. He has worked

out a structural-semantic classification, which reveals the function of a phraseological unit

depending on its size (collocations or sentences).

38.Semantic relations in phraseology

Traditionally, the following types of semantic relations in the lexical system are distinguished: synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, hyponymy, conversion, and causativity. In the field of phraseology, these phenomena display some specific properties. The focus of our paper is on revealing and discussing some of these properties. The starting point of the discussion is the category of semantic field. It provides the theoretical framework for considering semantic relationships between idioms. The semantic field is defined

as a set of lexical units which are connected with each other by some salient semantic features. The totality of semantic fields along with the conceptual links between them constructs the thesaurus of a given language, which can be represented in the form of a semantic network. The most important type of semantic relations within the semantic field is synonymy. Full synonymy is a rare phenomenon in phraseology, because the meaning of an idiom contains additional semantic features, namely the so-called image component. Idioms with identical actual meanings often reveal differences in their image components, and are perceived as near-synonyms, rather than full synonyms. Antonymy is not typical of phraseology because in most cases it is impossible to single out the central semantic feature that could be considered

responsible for meaning contrasts. Although traditionally idioms

were mainly regarded as monosemous units of the lexicon, the results of our recent research prove that idioms’ polysemy is a quite typical phenomenon.